'The camp shared space with genuine dread' ... The Fall of the House of Usher (1960). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

As literary adaptations jostle through the perfumed assault course of awards season, it's important we don't let all the ooh-la-la distract us from marking the 200th birthday of a writer with an assured place in cinema history: Edgar Allan Poe. He remains an important filmic figure in a manner befitting of his status generally – fractured, bastardised, and vastly influential.

In honour of his bicentennial, there's been much Poe chatter among film blogs lately, as is only right and proper. He was, after all, there from the very earliest days of the moving image: DW Griffith was among those silently adapting him before the 30s brought Universal's addled takes on The Raven and The Black Cat – although by the time their writers had retooled them for Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, neither had more than a whisker to do with the originals.

Thus it was left to the early 60s to give us what remain our best-known examples of Poe on film, the likes of The Pit and the Pendulum and The Fall of the House of Usher finding demented form through Roger Corman and American International Pictures and the results destined to claim new fans on late-night TV for decades to come. And while their outlandish tropes cranked up the already fevered nature of the source material, the camp still shared space with genuine dread: there's something about the mounting frenzy of The Masque of the Red Death that's at once hilarious and horribly unnerving.

Despite the glut of adaptations, however (and a glance at IMDb finds some kind of version of The Tell-Tale Heart still being made on a near-annual basis), Poe's cinematic legacy has also been a baleful seeping of his ideas into other stories. For instance, if a more subcutaneously creepy film emerged from Europe in the last 30 years than George Sluzier's The Vanishing then I've never seen it, and locked in its DNA was Poe's The Premature Burial.

But perhaps his real influence is still less explicit. Naturally, he could claim territorial rights over pretty much anything that might be called horror. Beyond that, however, given that The Murders in the Rue Morgue essentially created the detective story, there's a case to be made that his shadow falls long across the entire sprawling genres of thriller and crime drama. And that's without factoring in his monkeying around with the divide between fiction and reality in presenting The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a memoir, its hero's gruesome misadventures aboard the whaling ship Grampus a factual document drawn from life – a meta-marketing device which last showed up in the phenomenon that was The Blair Witch Project.

Yet the fate of The Narrative... is also the strangest thing about Poe's relationship with cinema (aside from the long-gestating biopic's status as a pet project of Sylvester Stallone) – because among the endless adaptations, it's one of the few of Poe's substantial works that remains unfilmed. Doubly weird considering that for any number of reasons, it should have made a great movie – his sole completed novel, as such suitable for adaptation both in length and potential spectacle as it prefaced every nautical travail since (Moby Dick included). But to date, not one film-maker, no matter how smitten or desperate, has ever so much as attempted to bring it to the screen. Or at least, keeping ourselves purely to the facts, done so and lived.